Jerusalem the Golden (29 page)

She could not bring herself, at first, to ask how the hospital suited her, or whether she would prefer to move, whether she would prefer a private nursing home, but in the end she forced herself to do so, and her mother said,

‘Oh no, I’m better off here.’

‘Are you sure,’ said Clara, feeling herself suddenly called upon to insist, ‘are you sure that you wouldn’t prefer to go somewhere more private? I mean, I’m not saying it’s not nice here, but we could find somewhere else, couldn’t we, surely, if you wanted …’

‘Why should I move?’ said her mother. ‘It’s all right here. They’ll look after me all right here. And after all,’ she said, looking at her daughter squarely in the eyes, ‘it’s only for three weeks or so, isn’t it? Three weeks’ treatment, they said, and I’ll be fit to go home.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Clara, unable to meet her looks, frightened before such grim mockery, ‘oh yes, it wouldn’t be for long. But even so, if you wanted to move … ’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Maugham, tired, suddenly tired of the whole business, turning her head to the tall white wall, ‘Oh, I’m not bothered, it’s all the same to me.’

Clara did not know what to do with herself for the rest of the day. It was Saturday; she knew that she had no reason not to stay till Monday, that she must stay until the end of the weekend. She spent the
afternoon wandering around town once more, looking in at the bookshop, gazing at the library and the windows of the department stores, walking, walking, tiring herself. The thought of the empty house unnerved her; she did not want to go back to it until she was fit to drop. She bought a sandwich for lunch and ate it as she walked, and in the middle of the afternoon, pleased to find herself hungry, glad to be able to fill in some time by eating, she went to have some tea. She went to the department store which her mother had always favoured, not through perversity, but because it was the only place she knew, and she walked through the counters of haberdashery and gadgets and stockings and cosmetics, and into the lift, and emerged in the tea room, and sat down and ordered herself a pot of tea and some teacakes. All around her, women met and talked and nodded to each other, in their unseasonable tweed suits and their hats and their linen dresses and their unfashionable expensive shoes. It was a nice shop; her mother liked it because it was a nice shop. At the next table there were two women, two middle-aged women, both grey-haired, and they were talking to each other with competitive pride about their grandchildren; each looked as though she might have been her mother, and yet from them seemed to pour such fountains of innocent, lovely, generous solicitude that Clara, overhearing them, suddenly wondered if her whole vision of Northam might not after all have been a nightmare, and that the whole city might have been filled with warm preoccupations, a whole kind city shut to her alone, distorted in her eyes alone. And she felt once more charitably towards herself, that she had had no wish to hate; she had merely wanted to live.

She visited her mother again in the evening, for the visiting hour, between seven and eight; Kathie was there too, released from the other evil of the children’s bedtime, and she and Clara exchanged embarrassed greetings by the bedside, and parted, at the hospital door, without having exchanged a word of truthful communication, without even acknowledging their mutual awareness of their visit’s purpose. Then Clara got back on the bus and went back to the house and let herself in. It surprised her, to have to unlock the door for herself. She had never had a front-door key before.

It was nine when she got back, and she did not think she could go to bed at nine, so she opened herself a tin of soup, then discovered that she was still hungry, and ate a tin of baked beans. There was no milk: she wanted a drink of Ovaltine, but there was no milk. She walked around the kitchen once or twice, and then she went and sat down in the sitting room, and looked at the books on the shelves, at the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the school prizes, the Edwardian novels, so well perused, but she did not feel that she would ever care to open a book again. Then she switched on the television, but it meant nothing to her, she had lost the habit of watching, she could not watch it alone. So she went and had a bath and went to bed. She was in bed before ten, and she fell asleep at once, and she dreamed that it was she herself that was dying, that she had been given a week to live, and she was crying in her dreams in despair, but I can’t die, there are so many things I wanted, there is so much I wanted to do, things that I can’t do now, I can’t do them this week, I wanted to do them later, you don’t understand, my plans, you don’t understand, my plans were long-term plans: and yet through her protests ran the fatal certainty that it would happen to her just the same, that it was useless to cry out, for they would never allow her the time that she needed. And then, through her dreams, she heard the telephone bell ringing, ringing downstairs, and she woke herself up and fumbled for the light and went down the stairs, and as she went, as she picked up the receiver, she found that her cheeks were wet, that she was sobbing, that she had been crying in her sleep, and that her throat was still trembling with emotion.

It was Gabriel who was speaking to her. At first, shivering and trembling, she could hardly answer him: his voice sounded as though it was coming to her from another world, after even so short an absence, and it sounded so desired and lovely that she felt relief settle into her, and she said to him, as soon as she could speak clearly, ‘Oh Gabriel, you woke me, I was asleep, I was dreaming that I was dying.’

And he talked to her, patiently, with his unfailing ready solicitude, until she had emerged from her night-time confusion, and then he started to ask her why she had left him. At first she could not even
think what he was talking about, and then it all came back to her, the party, and Magnus, and the taxi, and the hotel, and Gabriel asleep face downwards on the bed, and as she remembered it, as it took colour in her memory, she felt safe and warm once more, back at home in the realm of human treachery and love and infidelity.

‘You left me,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t me that left you, it was you that left me. How can you not remember?’

And then, tenderly, bitterly, they embarked upon explanation and recrimination. They went back over it, over the whole night in Paris, over their conflicting jealousies, over his desertion of the party and her silent departure, over his solitary waking in the hotel bedroom, and her return, and her news of her mother’s fatal illness. She asked him how he had known how to find her, and he said he had not known, but that he had tried everywhere, and that he had tried, finally, her home.

‘Oh God,’ he kept saying, ‘I’m glad the explanation’s so simple. I’m sorry, but I’m glad.’

After a while she said to him, when she had firmly regained her hold upon the situation,

‘Tell me, Gabriel, what time did you wake after I’d gone, that morning?’ And he laughed and said, ‘Oh Christ, don’t ask me, I didn’t wake till quarter to nine, and serve me bloody well right, I suppose,’ and they both laughed, and she could hear herself laughing, and some marvellous indestructible frivolity stirred in her again.

‘Look,’ he said, hearing her soften, ‘let me come up, let me come up and see you. We can’t leave it, we can’t leave it like this.’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you can’t, you can’t do that. What will they think, if you go away again so soon?’

‘Let me come,’ he said. ‘Let me come and fetch you back. You can’t stay up there, all by yourself. I’ll come up and drive you back.’

‘I don’t know why you should want to,’ she said. ‘I’ve finished with you, you know.’

‘Well,’ he said, seeming to know it, ‘then we could have one last glorious ride together, couldn’t we?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way.’

‘It’s only two hundred miles,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the map here open
in front of me. Let me come up for you. I’ll come up in the morning, and we could go back tomorrow night. Think how nice it would be, driving all that way together.’

‘It would be nice,’ she said, hesitating, completely hooked, as he knew, by the lure of such a treat.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘I’ve never really driven you anywhere. It would be nice, in the car. To ride together, forever ride, as Browning said, I believe. It would be our last fling.’

‘I don’t like your driving,’ she said, ‘you don’t go evenly, you accelerate too suddenly, I don’t like it. And then there’s another thing, I don’t want you to see this house, I don’t want you to see where I come from.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘What does it matter?’

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter where I come from, but where you come from, that matters to me, you know. All you are to me, you know, is a means of self-advancement.’

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘I knew that. For all you were to me was a means of escape.’

‘I knew that too,’ she said, ‘but how rude of you to say it.’

‘And did you advance yourself?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes, without doubt,’ she said. ‘Though others, I suppose, might see it as a decadence. And you, did you escape?’

‘After a fashion,’ he said.

‘I did better, then, than you,’ she said. And then said, with sudden certainty, ‘And look, I always do best. Look at me, what a fantastic piece of luck my life has been.’

‘You’ve worked hard for it too,’ he said.

‘Gabriel,’ she said, able to use his name at last, luxuriously, expensively, across the long-distance miles of wires, ‘Gabriel, if you come up and fetch me, which way back shall we go? Shall we go along the motorway and stop at all the all-night places?’

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t,’ he said.

‘It would be rather nice,’ she said. ‘I can’t deny that it would be rather nice.’

‘I’ll come, then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do that, you come. But you must remember
to shut your eyes when you get to this house, I don’t want you to remember it, I don’t want it in your memory.’

‘You’re a coward,’ he said. ‘Why can’t I know the worst?’

‘Because I don’t feel free of it,’ she said. ‘It’s a part of me for ever, I don’t want it to be a part of anyone else. I can’t be free, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be thought to be free, is there? In fact, listen, why don’t we make a rendezvous, why don’t I meet you outside the Town Hall?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘that won’t do.’

‘You mean you won’t?’ she said.

‘Yes, I mean I won’t. If you want to drive in my car, you must let me see your house.’

‘That’s fair enough, I suppose,’ she said. Then she laughed, and said, ‘I can show you a lovely tea set with tulips on, and all sorts of lovely things. After all, why shouldn’t you come? Why don’t you come right now?’

‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘I have to go home.’

‘Where are you now?’ she said, and then added, ‘No, don’t tell me, I know where you are, you’re at the house, aren’t you, you’re at your parents’, aren’t you?’

‘Where else,’ he said, ‘would I dare to run up such a phone bill?’

‘I like talking to you,’ she said, ‘in the middle of the night.’

‘It’s not so late,’ he said, ‘it’s only eleven.’

‘Good God,’ she said, ‘I thought it was nearly the morning. You will come, then, when it’s the morning, won’t you?’

‘I will come,’ he said.

‘Promise you will come,’ she said.

‘I promise,’ he said.

‘Will you find your way?’ she asked.

‘I suppose so.’

‘I won’t give you any instructions,’ she said. ‘I can never give people instructions. But come, you will come.’

‘I’ll get there,’ he said, ‘about midday.’

‘I have to go to the hospital,’ she said, ‘in the afternoon. But then I’ll be free.’

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Good night, then,’ she said.

And he too said good night, and she rang off. She went upstairs to bed again, and she lay on the bed, looking forward, all of it running into her head, all the years of future tender intrigue, a tender blurred world where Clelia and Gabriel and she herself in shifting and ideal conjunctions met and drifted and met once more like the constellations in the heavens; a bright and peopled world, thick with starry inhabitants, where there was no ending, no parting, but an eternal vast incessant rearrangement; and more close to her, more near to her, the drive in the car, the lengthy devious delicate explanations, the nostalgic connection more precious, more close, more intimate than any simple love, and the wide road itself, the lanes of traffic, the headlights, the speed and the movement, the glassy institutions where they would eat egg and chips and put coins in fruit machines and idly, gratuitously drink cups of nasty coffee, for the sake of it, for the sake of amusement, and all the lights in the surrounding dark. Her mother was dying, but she herself would survive it, she would survive even the guilt and convenience and grief of her mother’s death, she would survive because she had willed herself to survive, because she did not have it in her to die. Even the mercy and kindness of destiny she would survive; they would not get her that way, they would not get her at all.

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England